Catherine Breillat-À ma soeur! ('Fat Girl') (2001)

Twelve-year-old Anaïs is fat. Her sister, Elena, is a teenage beauty. While on vacation with their parents, Anaïs tags along with Elena as she explores the dreary seaside town. Elena meets Fernando, an Italian law student, who seduces her with promises of love, and the ever-watchful Anaïs bears witness to the corruption of her sister’s innocence. Precise and uncompromising, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a bold dissection of sibling rivalry and female adolescent sexuality from one of contemporary cinema‘s most controversial directors. criterion.com




A Ma Soeur! is a provocative and shocking drama about sibling rivalry, family discord and relationships. Elena is 15, beautiful and flirtatious. Her less confident sister, Anais, is 12, and constantly eats. On holiday, Elena meets a young Italian student who is determined to seduce her. Anais is forced to watch in silence, conspiring with the lovers, but harbouring jealousy and similar desires. Their actions, however, have unforeseen tragic consequences for the whole family. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0243255/plotsummary)




'Fat Girl' is about the lives of two sisters on a summer vacation. Elena is 15 beautiful and gets all the guys. Anais is cute but overweight and is 12. That summer, the lives of the two sisters change forever with one of the most shocking and controversial endings. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0243255/plotsummary)




Fat Girl is a typically shocking, utterly discomfiting provocation from director Catherine Breillat, whose excursions into female psychology and movie sexuality are anything but clinical. (See 36 Fillette and Romance for further proof.) Two adolescent sisters journey to the seaside on vacation with their parents; the younger sister is overweight and brooding, the older girl a beauty who attracts the attention of a smooth-talking boy. (--Robert Horton - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




Much of the film is built around two painstaking seduction scenes, characteristically shot by Breillat with both comic and horrific overtones and long, uncomfortable takes. The final section then tips into an outright descent into hell--you can never let your guard down with Breillat. So complicated were the seduction scenes that Breillat subsequently made a feature about the shooting of them, Sex Is Comedy. Fat Girl was released under an alternate title, A ma soeur!, but Fat Girl, in English, is Breillat's original and preferred title. (--Robert Horton - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




Catherine Breillat's film "Fat Girl" examines the relationship between two sisters--Anais and Elena. Pudgy, unattractive Anais (Anais Reboux) is 12 and svelte Elena (Roxane Mesquida) is 15. The girls are on holiday with their distracted father (Romain Goupil) and their bored mother (Arsinee Khanjian). It doesn't take Elena long before she attracts the attentions of a much older, Italian law student, Fernando (Libero De Rienzo). Fernando is a practiced young man when it comes to manipulating girls, and he frankly boasts about his many conquests. But it really doesn't take a great deal of skill to seduce Elena, and before long she's convinced he loves her and that they're engaged. (amazon.com)




When it comes to boys, Elena has no scruples and no common sense. This is in complete contrast to her much more interesting and sensible sister, Anais. Anais's dumpiness makes her an unlikely quarry for men like Fernando who are looking for just another conquest. Just as Fernando isn't interested in probing the character behind Elena's looks, Anais's looks result in her instant dismissal--the sisters are both rejected or accepted on face value only. Anais is an interested observer to Elena's folly through the course of the holiday. She watches Elena's behaviour, keeping her own counsel, and reaches conclusions based on Elena's experience. Elena believes she wants to give herself, for the first time, to someone special--a man she loves. In contrast, the much more complicated Anais wants her first sexual experience to be with someone who means absolutely nothing. (amazon.com)




Just what befalls these two girls is the subject of the film. The plot examines how these two vastly different sisters treat each other--Elena uses Anais as a cover for her antics, but most of the time, she's ashamed of her plain sister and is cruel as a result. Anais deals with Elena rather stoically for the most part--only allowing the occasional barb to deliver a sting. She too uses Elena in her own fashion, and to her Elena is almost an experiment in the exploitative nature of male-female relationships. Film's ending, nonetheless, provided an ironic peculiar presentation of Anais's philosophy. Director Catherine Breillat's controversial films are always interesting to watch, and "Fat Girl" is not an exception. (amazon.com)










FAT GIRL was first shown to the public on Feb. 10, 2001, when it ran in competition at the Berlin Int. Film Festival. This interview with Catherine Breillat was conducted for German TV the day after the screening.